GroundSource Messaging FAQ’s and Troubleshooting

Text messaging is a 30+ year-old technology, and it’s more powerful and relevant than ever, but it also has its fair share of quirks. In this guide, we provide essential tips and troubleshooting steps to optimize your text messaging experience with GroundSource.

  1. Test, test, and test again before broadcasting

    1. Set up a group of testers within your org, ideally with a mix of Android and iPhone devices; different handsets can occasionally have difficulty receiving certain messages.

  2. Attached multimedia needs to be under 500kb

    1. If an image is too large (you will get a warning message if it is), you can resize it in Preview (on a Mac) by double-clicking on the image in the finder, going to Tools => Resize Image

    2. On a Mac or PC, you can use Luna to resize or manipulate the picture: Luna Image Editor

  3. If someone says they’re not receiving a message, go through this checklist

    1. Check their chat log (via the Inbox view, or by clicking on Chat Log in the feed underneath their message)

    2. Search for their phone number in the feed to see if their status was set to Disabled

    3. If Disabled, you can re-enable by clicking Enable, or they can text START to restart (they may have texted STOP at some point)

    4. If not Disabled, refer to section 5 in this guide.

  4. If messages are delayed

    1. Make sure you have sent using your assigned 8XX number (and not a local number). 8XX numbers are designated for high-volume, rapid sending; 10-digit local numbers are not.

    2. If the delayed message included multimedia, see if shrinking the size of the media helps

  5. If messages aren’t arriving at all

    1. Again, check and make sure your phone number hasn’t been somehow disabled from receiving messages (typically by texting in STOP): text START to the phone number in question.

    2. Email us at info@groundsource.co. We investigate messages not being received with our provider. Make sure you indicate the time the message was sent, the phone number it was sent from, and the number it was sent to.

    3. Make sure you have included “Text STOP to quit” somewhere in your message. Occasionally providers will flag messages that don’t include that as spam and temporarily block messaging.

  6. If messages are splitting up on receipt

    1. Occasionally, on some handsets, messages get split up. Once they are split up (which typically happens between the cell tower and the phone) we lose control over the order of delivery, meaning that the messages will not only be split up, but they may be out of order.

    2. Should this happen, see if your message exceeded the character limit. Messages over the character limit may split up (but some phones may receive the message just fine).

  7. Checking your character count and shortening messages

    1. You’ll see at the bottom of the message composition box a character counter that counts down as you type. Messages on 8XX numbers typically have a ~600 character limit (but you may find that you can exceed that number, even substantially, and the messages still go out fine).

    2. If you have exceeded the limit, and messages are splitting up, reduce it by editing the content. Also, if you have included any special character (including emoji or even curly quotation marks), that will immediately lower your character limit to ~350 characters.

    3. To check if your messages have any special characters, use this character counting and mapping tool: SMS Length Calculator

Anything missing from this guide? Send us an email at info@groundsource.co and we’ll make sure to add it.